Business Censor, using the example of the seized property of the former husband of the Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States, Olga Stefanishyna, as an example, attempted to understand the existing practices at ARMA. What Olga Stefanishyna has accomplished.
Potential criminal charges for the US ambassador and the ARMA's less-than-optimistic results
ARMA — the National Agency of Ukraine for Asset Identification, Tracing, and Management is a central executive body, subordinate to the Cabinet of Ministers, authorized, as its name suggests, to search for assets that may be subject to seizure in criminal proceedings or in a case of recognition of property as unjustified and its recovery.
Stefanishina's case as an example of ARMA functioning
Recently, social media and the media have reported that a replacement for Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, Olga Stefanishyna, is being prepared due to the high likelihood that she will soon be charged with abuse of office.
Stefanishyna has already submitted a request to leave her diplomatic service "due to personal circumstances." This coincided with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's announced personnel shakeup of the government—a change in the government and the heads of law enforcement agencies.
The case against Olga Stefanishyna allegedly concerns the January 2025 transfer of the Trade Union House building in central Kyiv by the National Agency of Ukraine for Identification, Tracing, and Management of Assets (ARMA). Following a Prozorro auction, this asset was transferred to the management of the Consortium "KAMParitet Management Company," a company close to Olga Stefanishyna's ex-husband, Mykhailo Stefanishin.
Following the publication in June 2025 of an investigation by Ukrayinska Pravda journalist Mykhailo Tkach into the consortium's cooperation with ARMA, the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) became interested in the circumstances of the case.
Mykhailo Tkach's investigation noted that Mykhailo Stefanishin, in informal conversations with businessmen and politicians, introduced himself as the "shadow curator of the office" of ARMA, and said that a company associated with him had already received four valuable assets from ARMA for management.
Immediately after its registration in May 2024, the KAMParityt consortium received commercial real estate management rights to 18 Pavlovskaya Street in the center of Kyiv.
House of Trade Unions
Subsequently, he took control of the aforementioned Trade Union House on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the Flagman shopping center in Ivano-Frankivsk, and Ukrainian Berry LLC, one of Ukraine's largest berry producers. Previously, this producer was officially owned by a Russian citizen and, after a full-scale raid, was arrested and placed under the control of ARMA.
Mikhail Tkach's article notes that the Russian owner, despite his arrest, likely retained influence over the business. At least the head of one of the three founding firms of the consortium, Berry Hub Plus, worked at Ukrainskaya Yagoda and under the Russian beneficiary.
At the time of the transfer of assets to this consortium, Olha Stefanishyna held the position of Vice Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine and Minister of Justice of Ukraine.
Olga Stefanishina and Taras Golub
The first director of KAMParitet, which received the frozen assets from ARMA for management, was Stefanishyna's former adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister, Taras Holub.
Olga Stefanishina herself has denied any involvement in the ARMA asset scandal, noting that she separated from Mikhail Stefanishin long ago and that her ex-husband has no influence on her work or actions.
Mikhail Tkach notes that KAMParityt was the only private structure that, in less than a year of operation, managed to win four ARMA competitions to find a manager.
In just two years of the agency's operation under Elena Duma's chairmanship (July 2023 – July 2025), eleven tenders were successfully completed. This means that KAMParityt was given the opportunity to manage more than a third of all properties assigned to ARMA managers.
In July 2025, the Special Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office confirmed that criminal proceedings had been opened based on the facts published in Mykhailo Tkach's article under Part 2 of Article 364 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (abuse of power or official position, resulting in grave consequences), but no suspicions were filed at that time.
In September 2025, the Chair of the Anti-Corruption Policy Committee and Servant of the People MP Anastasia Radina reported that the KAMParityt consortium owed ARMA approximately two million hryvnias, which it was supposed to pay under management contracts. The manager is required to pay a monthly percentage of the profits from the properties under its management, and if this is not paid, a guarantee payment goes to the state budget.
"Let's start with the fact that the company hasn't paid any percentage of its profits to the state—only guarantee payments. However, for example, at 18 Pavlovskaya Street in Kyiv, where KAMParitet took over management, there's a store called 'Mir Mattressov'. So, it's likely that there is some profit from the operations of the managed properties," Radina noted at the time.
Business Censor found several recently initiated lawsuits that ARMA resolved against KAMParityt to collect debts totaling more than UAH 2,26 million.
MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak reported that as of March 1 of this year, KAMparitet owed the state budget almost 7,5 million hryvnias. ARMA allegedly informed KAMparitet about a change in management for the premises at 18 Pavlovska Street and the Flagman shopping center. However, according to Zheleznyak, the assets are still being used by the consortium, generating income that bypasses the state budget.
ARMA's mandate includes facilitating criminal proceedings by identifying and tracing assets at the request of investigators, detectives, or pre-trial investigation agencies, with the aim of seizing and confiscating such assets or recovering them for state use. It also forwards requests to relevant authorities in other countries to identify and trace assets abroad, and represents Ukraine's rights and interests abroad in cases involving the return to Ukraine of assets obtained through corruption and other crimes.
Based on a court decision, ARMA also manages assets seized in criminal proceedings, with the aim of preserving or increasing their economic value. The assets may be transferred for management, as in the Stefanishin case, under a management agreement. Alternatively, they may sell the assets and then deposit the cash in state-owned bank accounts until the criminal proceedings are concluded. This depends on the specific court decision.
ARMA was founded back in 2015. Its creation was one of the points in Ukraine's action plan for visa liberalization with the European Union.
Due to the specific nature of its activities, the agency faces high corruption risks when distributing seized/confiscated property into the "right" hands. It has often been involved in corruption scandals, and the agency's top managers are defendants in criminal proceedings.
Following the full-scale invasion, ARMA's activities came under even greater public scrutiny, with court decisions resulting in ARMA being defrauded of an unprecedented amount of valuable assets belonging to Russians and collaborators, amounting to tens of billions of hryvnias.
Reforming the agency is a mandatory criterion for Ukraine's accession to the EU.
Business Censor monitors ARMA's activities. We previously interviewed Elena Duma's predecessor, Dmitry Zhoravovich, who, among other things, described how the then Ministry of Justice opposed the sale of Medvedchuk's yacht.
Since its inception, ARMA has repeatedly become the epicenter of corruption scandals. The agency has been justifiably accused of lack of transparency and inefficiency. Last year, the opinion even spread among parliamentarians that ARMA would be easier to liquidate than to reform.
However, in the summer of 2025, the president signed Law No. 4503-IX on strengthening the institutional capacity of ARMA. The document is intended to fundamentally change the agency's effectiveness in asset recovery and management, clearly delineating its functions into three key areas:
- detection and search;
- asset Management;
- international cooperation.
ARMA Performance Report
The Institute of Legislative Ideas think tank has published a new report on ARMA's activities in 2024-2025. Business Censor has carefully reviewed it and compiled the key findings.
Organizationally, the agency consists of a central office and regional offices. Key decisions regarding the management of seized assets are made at the central office, while the regional offices have a limited role.
In 2024-2025, the maximum number of employees in the central office was only 300, and in the territorial offices, 90. In reality, the number of employees was even lower: 194 people worked in the central office in 2024, and 51 in the territorial offices (in 2025, the number was 229 and 7, respectively). ARMA notes high staff turnover and the difficulty of attracting specialists, which impacts the agency's operations, particularly in managing complex assets.
At the same time, the value of the assets accumulated under ARMA's management is measured in tens of billions of hryvnias. And ARMA's funding does not correspond to the scale of its functions and the assets it manages: in 2024, ARMA's expenses amounted to UAH 189 million, of which UAH 121 million was for salaries. In fact, UAH 148 million was spent on salaries. In 2025, ARMA was allocated UAH 539,11 million by special law, of which UAH 201,81 million was for salaries, or UAH 229,34 million in actual funds.
According to Articles 16-18 of the new ARMA Law, the agency must take measures to quickly locate assets, allowing for seizure and, if there are grounds, transfer of property into management.
A similar approach is laid down in EU Directive 2024/1260, which places emphasis on the early, rapid and effective detection and identification of assets as a prerequisite for their subsequent freezing, confiscation and management.
At the same time, the EU directive significantly expands the functional model of asset recovery bodies compared to the current functionality of ARMA.
The EU provides for the possibility of promptly freezing assets to prevent their alienation or concealment even before the confiscation procedure is completed, but ARMA does not have this.
Analyzing ARMA's 2024 report, Transparency International Ukraine noted that of the 12,352 real estate properties identified by the agency, only 1512 were seized, and 289 were transferred for management. Of the 106,470 land plots identified, 1759 were seized, and 1,759 were transferred for management. Transfer rates also remained low. According to the organization's estimates, approximately 7,8% of identified assets were seized, and less than 3% were transferred for management.
The published data for 2025 do not allow us to determine the total number of assets identified through the asset search function in criminal proceedings or to trace their subsequent fate.
Property management To Olga Stefanishina
ARMA positions asset management as a key area of its work, focusing its reports on the number of assets transferred and the volume of budget revenues.
ARMA's main financial result last year came from several strategic energy sector assets transferred to the management of Ukrnafta OJSC. These included the Glusco gas station chain, the corporate rights of PJSC PK Ukrnaftoburenie, Sirius-1 LLC, and Sakhalinske LLC. As well as the corporate rights of PJSC Lviv Insulator Company, transferred to PJSC NEC Ukrenergo.
Potential criminal charges for the US ambassador and the ARMA's less-than-optimistic results
At the same time, the lion's share of assets under ARMA's management do not generate income for unknown reasons.
Sometimes the actual transfer of property management is delayed for a significant period. For example, the luxurious estate of former Yanukovych-era Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko, located in central Kyiv, was not transferred to ARMA for years, allegedly due to a lack of keys.
It's already known that former Justice Minister Herman Galushchenko , a defendant in the Midas case, lived there for a time . NABU officers spotted former Energy Minister Svetlana Grinchuk near the estate.
Herman Galushchenko: The Boss of Ukraine's Energy Corruption. Part 1
The report also cites limited access to the already transferred Gulliver shopping center, which, despite two tenders held by ARMA, has yet to be assigned a manager. Gulliver was subsequently transferred to the state-owned banks that had originally financed its construction with preferential loans.
A telling example concerns the premises of the Stereo Plaza shopping center in Kyiv at 119a Lobanovsky Street. They were transferred to a manager just 11 days after the contract was signed. However, the shopping center was only under management for a few months: a Kyiv district court lifted the seizure of the property, so the management contract with ARMA was terminated. During this short period, the center generated over 950 hryvnias in state revenue.
Which ARMA assets generated state budget revenue in 2025?
The five largest managers accumulated 24 assets, or approximately 58,5% of the total number of management contracts.
The largest managers were:
- Voeger Plus LLC
- PJSC Ukrnafta
- State Unitary Enterprise "Priority"
- LLC "Kombinat Plus"
- KUP "KOMPARITET"
Last year, a significant portion of assets remained concentrated in a relatively small number of participants.
Potential criminal charges for the US ambassador and the ARMA's less-than-optimistic results
By the end of 2025, total revenue from asset management amounted to UAH 2,178 billion. Meanwhile, the volume of guaranteed payments stipulated by management agreements amounted to only UAH 231,92 million. Actual revenue exceeded guaranteed payments by UAH 1,95 billion due to energy sector assets.
The largest revenues were provided by the corporate rights of PJSC PC Ukrgazburenie (UAH 1,82 billion), the Glusco gas station network (UAH 257,8 million), and the corporate rights of Sakhalinskoye LLC (UAH 56,8 million), managed by PJSC Ukrnafta.
That is, 98% of all revenues were generated by a limited number of large assets, while the rest of the assets did not generate any income at all.
ARMA Asset Sale Auctions To Olga Stefanishina
According to official data, only 41 out of 184 auctions (about 22%) were successful last year, meaning that the majority of procedures did not result in a sale.
Of the 184 auctions held in 2025, 144 ended inconclusively, and 11 were cancelled. Of the 84 auctions that took place, these were repeat procedures, meaning they involved changes to the terms of the sale.
The asset sale consists of three sequential stages: the first auction—three rounds of price increases in real time; the second ("repeat")—with a starting price of 50% of the first; the third ("repeat" using the step-by-step price reduction method, i.e., a Dutch auction)—also starting from 50% of the starting price.
Finally, the total amount of funds received from the sale of lots amounted to UAH 196 million, while the total starting price of the assets exceeded UAH 1 billion.
Potential criminal charges for the US ambassador and the ARMA's less-than-optimistic results
ARMA Registry To Olga Stefanishina
According to the new law, ARMA must maintain and administer the Unified State Register of Assets Seized in Criminal Proceedings (EGRAA).
Pre-trial investigation bodies, the prosecutor's office, and the courts compile data that serves as the basis for entering assets into the register. This may include, in particular, court decisions.
The State Judicial Administration of Ukraine provides electronic interaction with the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (EGRAA) through the Trembita system, which allows for the automatic transfer of court decisions to the registry.
In practice, the registry is a large collection of records on the seizure of certain assets, which, however, does not allow us to answer basic questions: what volume of assets is liquid, what portion of the assets has been released from seizure, and which assets from the registry have been transferred for management or sale. In other words, it is impossible to track the fate of seized assets.
To Olga Stefanishina
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To Olga Stefanishina
Due to the lack of asset lifecycle tracking, the registry becomes a dead record of property that was once transferred to ARMA by the relevant authorities.
For example, in the fall of 2024, ARMA reported over 324,000 registry entries and 72,000 assets under management. After conducting an inventory as of December 31, 2025, ARMA already operated with 102,569 entries.
When discussing the issue of data in the registry at a meeting of the parliamentary committee on anti-corruption policy, ARMA representatives explained this by a “revision of the accounting methodology” and the exclusion from the registry of a large number of objects “without independent economic value.”
"Even after modernization, the system continues to reflect the existence of individual assets or procedural decisions regarding them, but does not provide full tracking of their subsequent movement," the Institute of Legislative Ideas noted in a report.
International cooperation
Asset recovery through international cooperation is another function of ARMA, encompassing the identification, seizure, confiscation, and repatriation of criminally obtained assets abroad, such as Medvedchuk's yacht, mentioned above.
In 2024, ARMA reported that an international search had uncovered 16 bank accounts with balances exceeding $6 million, three properties, two vehicles, and shares in foreign companies worth more than €400,000.
In 2025, ARMA reported only 246 requests from foreign authorities and fulfilled requests from Ukrainian law enforcement agencies regarding assets abroad. At the same time, the agency's reports lack information on the return of assets to Ukraine (confiscation abroad, repatriation of assets) and a financial report on such actions.
We can conclude that despite attempts to reform ARMA, the agency's operations are hardly effective or transparent. At the same time, reforming the system for managing seized assets and improving ARMA's effectiveness, in addition to being crucial for ensuring public justice for known collaborators, remains crucial for replenishing the state budget. This has been and remains a priority within the framework of international support programs for Ukraine, particularly the Ukraine Facility program.
Is there political will to accelerate ARMA reform and enable the agency's normal functioning? Is the prevailing desire to continue fishing for large assets in troubled waters unhindered? The question is rhetorical.
Skelet.Org
On the topic : Eldorado and Gulliver owner Viktor Polischuk won a lawsuit against ARMA over allegations of ties to Medvedev.
To Olga Stefanishina / Olga Stefanishina / Olga Stefanishina
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